And without us, in society, to whom come esteem and contempt, consideration and infamy? Certainly opinion has its mistakes, but they are not long. In general, if charlatans, intriguers, impostors of every kind, for some time surreptitiously get suffrages, it must be that a sustained honesty is the surest and the almost infallible means of reaching a good renown.
I regret that upon this point time does not allow of any development. It would have afforded me delight, after having distinguished virtue from happiness, to show them to you almost always united by the admirable law of merit and demerit. I should have been pleased to show you this beneficent law already governing human destiny, and called to preside over it more exactly from day to day by the ever-increasing progress of lights in governments and peoples, by the perfecting of civil and judicial institutions. It would have been my wish to make pass into your minds and hearts the consoling conviction that, after all, justice is already in this world, and that the surest road to happiness is still that of virtue.
This was the opinion of Socrates and Plato; and it is also that of Franklin, and I gather it from my personal experience and an attentive examination of human life. But I admit that there are exceptions; and were there but one exception, it would be necessary to explain it.
Suppose a man, young, beautiful, rich, amiable, and loved, who, placed between the scaffold and the betrayal of a sacred cause, voluntarily mounts the scaffold at twenty years of age. What do you make of this noble victim? The law of merit and demerit seems here suspended. Do you dare blame virtue, or how in this world do you accord to it the recompense that it has not sought, but is its due?
By careful search you will find more than one case analogous to that.
The laws of this world are general; they turn aside to suit no one: they pursue their course without regard to the merit or demerit of any. If a man is born with a bad temperament, it is in virtue of certain obscure but undeviating physical laws, to which he is subject, like the animal and the plant, and he suffers during his whole life, although personally innocent. He is brought up in the midst of flames, epidemics, calamities that strike at hazard the good as well as the bad.
Human justice condemns many that are innocent, it is true, but it absolves, in fault of proof, more than one who is culpable. Besides, it knows only certain derelictions. What faults, what basenesses occur in the dark, which do not receive merited chastisement! In like manner, what obscure devotions of which God is the sole witness and judge! Without doubt nothing escapes the eye of conscience, and the culpable soul cannot escape remorse. But remorse is not always in exact relation with the fault committed; its vivacity may depend on a nature more or less delicate, on education and habit. In a word, if it is in general very true that the law of merit and demerit is fulfilled in this world, it is not fulfilled with mathematical rigor.
What must we conclude from this? That the world is ill-made? No. That cannot be, and is not. That cannot be, for incontestably the world has a just and good author; that is not, for, in fact, we see order reigning in the world; and it would be absurd to misconceive the manifest order that almost everywhere shines forth on account of a few phenomena that we cannot refer to order. The universe endures, therefore it is well made. The pessimism of Voltaire is still more opposed to the aggregate of facts than an absolute optimism. Between these two systematic extremes which facts deny, the human race places the hope of another life. It has found it very irrational to reject a necessary law on account of some infractions; it has, therefore, maintained the law; and from infractions it has only concluded that they ought to be referred to the law, that there will be a reparation. Either this conclusion must be admitted, or the two great principles previously admitted, that God is just, and that the law of merit and demerit is an absolute law, must be rejected.
Now, to reject these two principles is to totally overthrow all human belief.
To maintain them, is implicitly to admit that actual life must be, elsewhere terminated or continued.